George Saunders: ‘Haughty, Thin-Skinned’ Trump Is the Anti-Lincoln

David Crosby

George Saunders, one of America’s most admired short story writers, recently published his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, about Abraham Lincoln’s visits to the ghost-haunted graveyard where his young son was buried. Saunders says that researching the book really made him appreciate how much tragedy and derision Lincoln had to endure.

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“Lincoln was criticized in his tenure as president so much, from so many quarters,” Saunders says in Episode 243 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “And then his son died, right in the middle of that.”

People who met Lincoln consistently reported that he was one of the kindest people they ever encountered. Saunders says it was that kindness, along with Lincoln’s sharp mind, that allowed him to lead the country through the darkest days of the Civil War.

“You see this really incredible intelligence,” Saunders says. “It always reminded me of somebody in a pitching sea, drowning, with an open wound, but still managing to think logically and empathetically.”

Saunders spent four years writing the novel, completely immersed in Lincoln’s life and thoughts, so it was a bit of a shock to go from that to writing about Donald Trump.

“To come out of that into the current political environment was pretty interesting,” Saunders says, “and to see in Trump so many of the direct contradictions of [Lincoln’s qualities].”

Saunders says that one of Lincoln’s greatest assets was his ability to absorb criticism without lashing out. It’s another way in which the two presidents are polar opposites.

“Trump, as this super-sized celebrity, made a running joke of that kind of haughty, thin-skinned snappish quality when he was on TV,” Saunders says. “It’s just mind-blowing that we accepted that as a leadership trait.”

Listen to our complete interview with George Saunders in Episode 243 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

George Saunders on writing at work:

“It was the old days, and they gave us these big clunky PCs, and at that time Wordperfect was the dominant software. It was Shift-F3, I still remember the command, to go back and forth between files. So the trick was I’d get my story up there and start working on it, and then when somebody walked in you’d hit Shift-F3 to bring up your work document. And I’d sort of figured out the optimal location for the desk so that it took them the most steps to get behind me. … Sometimes somebody would say, ‘I need a cover for the Kodak document,’ and you’re like, ‘Yeah, that’s an hour.’ And really it was just centering some text, so you could kind of build in a little bit of cushion to get some [writing] done. … Though especially as I started publishing, there was more policing by certain people.”

George Saunders on science fiction:

“Somehow I had kind of a wall up between what I considered ‘serious literature’ and that sci-fi stuff that I loved in my everyday life. It was a bit of a working class idea that literature was way too holy for any of that stuff to come in—that was for fun, that was the stuff you really loved, but it didn’t belong in your writing. And then I had the realization that if you’re going to compel a reader to keep reading, you have to use what’s best in you, and most joyful and genuine, whereas before I’d been keeping a lot of stuff out. I’d been keeping humor out, I’d been keeping dirty jokes out. … [I was] trying to be very refined, keeping my class origins out, and keeping the sci-fi stuff out. And then when I took that wall down, suddenly I was like, ‘Oh god, now I know how to proceed.'”

George Saunders on writing Lincoln in the Bardo:

“After Tenth of December was done and was about to come out, I was like, ‘Man, you’re 54. You’ve had a good run. This thing has been bugging you for years, and the reason you think you can’t write it is because it’s too hard, it’s going to take too much emotional earnestness. Why would you say no to that?’ That’s cowardly. To get to that point in your career and go, ‘Well, I better just keep repeating myself so I don’t make any mistakes.’ So I just made a little contract with myself that I was going to try it, in that three or four months before the book came out, and see if it caught fire, and it really did. … I have a friend who’s a writer, and about that time I wrote to him and said, ‘I’m writing something that may be the best thing I ever wrote or a real career-ender.’ And he goes, ‘Well don’t forget. It could be both.'”

George Saunders on Lincoln’s religious views:

“As the war seemed to be a total stalemate that looked like it was going to stretch 20 years into the future, he did do this kind of turning toward something [spiritual], and his conclusion was something like, ‘Well, whatever runs this universe, if it wanted to stop this war it could and it would. It seems that it doesn’t want to stop it, so therefore it must have some purpose.’ And he came to believe that the purpose was—I can’t remember the phrase, but basically to expiate the sin of the nation that was slavery, through blood. Which is a kind of mystical way of saying something that was literally true, which was that the two sides in this were not going to compromise. They could have talked for a million years and never broken through. There was too much money on the line, and so they just had to kill it out.”